Buy your .community domain today

A .community domain suits any group whose identity is the people in it. Neighborhood and residents associations, faith groups, co-ops, mutual aid networks, alumni groups and hobby collectives all sit naturally on it.

It has also been adopted by commercial organizations for their member spaces. The MLOps Community, a professional network of tens of thousands of practitioners, runs on mlops.community, and consumer brands use it for the group around a product rather than the product itself.

The common thread is belonging rather than trade. If the site exists so people can find each other, the ending describes it more precisely than any generic alternative.

No, .community is open to anyone, and nonprofit status is never checked. Registration carries no requirement to be incorporated, to be a membership organization or to be non-commercial.

The marketing around it does lean charitable, which is where the impression comes from. Registrar copy routinely aims it at nonprofits and social enterprises, and that has left plenty of commercial buyers assuming they are ineligible.

Live use says otherwise. British skincare brand TEMPLESPA runs a .community address, and developer-tooling companies use one for their user groups, all under exactly the same open terms.

No, .community is a standard open extension, despite what the word suggests. ICANN does operate a formal category of community-based extensions that carry genuine eligibility restrictions and a dispute policy for challenging registrations, and .community is not one of them.

Its registry agreement is the ordinary unsponsored kind with no community registration specification attached. The winning application went further and said pre-registration verification would not be used at all, on the view that screening denies access to legitimate registrants.

This trips people up in both directions. Some groups assume they must prove community status and never apply, and others assume the ending certifies something about a site. Neither is true, so treat it as a descriptive word rather than a credential.

.community and .club imply different relationships with the people involved. .club suggests a boundary, with members, a roster and often dues, while .community suggests open belonging with nothing to join.

That maps onto real use. Sports teams, fan clubs and subscription groups gravitate to .club, and residents associations, faith groups and mutual aid networks gravitate to .community.

Cost and length pull the other way. .club is shorter to type and cheaper to renew, so a group that could honestly use either often lands on .club for practical reasons.

A .community domain and a community section on your main site solve different problems, and plenty of brands use both. The extension gives you something short and sayable, and the main domain keeps your search authority in one place.

There is a clear example of that split. Ionic, the developer-tools company, holds ionic.community and points it straight at the community section of its primary site, so the memorable address exists without splitting the content.

That is usually the right pattern. Print the .community address on badges, slides and QR codes, keep the pages themselves on the domain that already ranks, and revisit only if the group grows into something separate from the brand.

Yes, a .community domain is a common choice for a brand customer or user community. Nothing in the registration rules distinguishes commercial from non-commercial use.

It works best when the space genuinely belongs to the members. A forum, a user group, an ambassador program or an events network all read correctly, because the address describes the people rather than the product.

It reads badly when it is really marketing. Putting a newsletter sign-up or a testimonials page on a .community address invites the obvious complaint, and a group with no conversation in it will not look like a community whatever the ending says.

A .community label can run up to sixty-three characters and uses letters, numbers and hyphens, with no leading or trailing hyphen. Short labels of a single character are permitted by the registry, though almost all of those are long gone.

The number that matters is the total. .community adds ten characters to whatever you choose, so the label is where you keep things tight, and the shortest live examples show how far that goes.

Pick a label that survives being said aloud. grace.community and files.community are both easy to dictate, where a hyphenated three-word label on top of a ten-character ending is the address people give up on.

A .community address is longer than most alternatives, and that is the strongest argument against it. The ending alone is ten characters, so the full address is rarely short.

The registrants who make it work all do the same thing. They pair it with a very short label, which is why the live zone is full of single-word addresses rather than descriptive phrases, and those read cleanly on a poster or in speech.

It also matters less than it once did. Almost all of your traffic arrives from a link in a message, a search result or a QR code on a noticeboard, and the address only has to be typed by hand in the rare case where someone works from print.

.org is the more recognized ending and .community is the more descriptive one, and that is the whole trade. A visitor who has never met .community will still recognize .org instantly, and it usually renews for less.

What .org cannot do is say what the group is. It signals a non-commercial posture and nothing more, where .community tells someone the site exists for its members before they read a word of it.

Availability often decides it in the end. Good short .org names have been taken for decades, so a group that would have to accept a hyphenated or padded .org can frequently get the exact one-word label it wants on .community instead.